


Pays Merveilleux

by PlaidAdder



Series: Missing Pages [26]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Book: The Hound of the Baskervilles, Epistolary, M/M, Past Drug Addiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 22:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14819867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: You asked me, just before you fell asleep tonight, if we are ever going to speak about that night at Baskerville Hall. You are asleep still, in your dear old bed, whose every lump and creak is now intimately familiar to me; and I am here, committing to paper a story which I fear, if I tried to articulate it in your presence, I might be unable to complete. But though I know that, for some reason, I can only tell this story alone and to these sheets of paper, I have no fear of showing it to you. I have said it often before, but never with such perfect confidence and conviction: I know my Watson.*****Holmes writes his first love letter to Watson.***This is the end of the series...for now. Thanks for reading, everyone!





	Pays Merveilleux

August 15, 1891

 

My very dear Watson,

Yesterday, as we sat together on the hearth-rug in our sitting room surrounded by that cyclone of secret testimonies, sensitive documents, confessional letters, and eminently suppressable papers, I watched you surreptitiously extract from it the creased, stained, and water-marked sheet of paper that I once left for you on a shelf of rock at Reichenbach Falls. Was it only three months ago? It seems three years to me. Everything else--Mycroft's letter to me, our letters to him, our copy of Mr. Andrew Moriarty's letter, Sophia's affidavit, those sheets of dirty foolscap from that hotel in Florence, (may providence reward the Lady Frances Carfax for happening to save from that burning barn the one waistcoat into whose lining I had sewn them--and thank providence she did not find and read them!), and so many others--went into your battered old tin dispatch-box, locked away (perhaps) for posterity. But that one sheet of paper, the most tragic and painful of all of them, you chose to keep by you. It surprised me, until I realized that it is, I believe, the longest letter I have ever written to you.

Well really, I told myself. I believe I  _can_ do better than  _that._

You asked me, just before you fell asleep tonight, if we are ever going to speak about that night at Baskerville Hall. You are asleep still, in your dear old bed, whose every lump and creak is now intimately familiar to me; and I am here, committing to paper a story which I fear, if I tried to articulate it in your presence, I might be unable to complete. I haven't decided yet whether I shall leave it somewhere for you to find, or present it to you like a fumbling Mr. Darcy: "Would you do me the honor of reading this letter?" But though I know that, for some reason, I can only tell this story alone and to these sheets of paper, I have no fear of showing it to you. I have said it often before, but never with such perfect confidence and conviction: I know my Watson.

Why, then, did I slip out of your bed, and through the window, and onto the moor, instead of waiting there with you until the dawn roused both of us? 

You must first understand, Watson, that it was not until I was living alone out on the moors, with days on end of waiting and watching and only intermittent spurts of actual investigation, that I came to understand how strongly I was drawn toward the drug against which you have warned me so often. I had always thought of it as an amusing stimulation, like music or the theater, with which to while away the empty hours until something more interesting came along. It was during that case, Watson, that I first began to realize that I was no longer master of my own impulses. I would find myself, in the midst of my researches, feeling anxious about how long it would be before I could return to my rooms in Coombe Tracy and to the morocco case secreted therein. I would awaken in the morning determined to destroy the thing, and find myself returning after luncheon to puncture my skin once again with that infernal needle. It was a new and extremely unpleasant sensation, Watson, to realize that without my knowing it, my intentions had changed, and that my hands were stealing toward the vial while my mind believed it was busy with some other matter entirely. 

I had not yet developed that mood of cynical defiance which you captured so vividly in your account of Mary Morstan's case. I was furious with myself for having allowed a mere chemical compound to gain an ascendancy over me. And in the midst of all this, I was reading your letters, three days after you posted them. You were so generous with them, even though I was playing what I now understand to be a rather low trick upon you; and they brightened so many of those blank and terrible hours. But you know now, Watson, that in my character there is just a touch of the green-eyed monster. I don't think either of us will ever forget the night of the Society's annual dinner, where--after reading to a rapt audience the redacted "Adventure of Holy Peters"--you were somehow prevailed upon to give the assembly a rendition of the Pirate King's song from _Pirates of Penzance_. What an exquisite torment! Not one of them could take their eyes off of you. Even the former Miss Smith, accompanying you at the piano, kept stealing surreptitious glances. And you knew it, you wretch; I saw your eyes on me all the while, as they launched en masse into their choruses of "Hurrah for the Pirate King!" As soon as the last note faded, I ran to call a cab. I felt that if I had to wait even five minutes to handle you, I would simply burst into flame. I am very sorry that we missed the overture, but the fifteen minutes I knew it would take to go from the Society's headquarters to Drury Lane were certainly not long enough to satisfy either of us. We made it to the box in time for Pizarro's first entrance; and I have no regrets.

I have fallen into your bad habit of digression, Watson. I return to my theme.

I am, as I say, somewhat susceptible to jealousy; and much more so in those early days, before the long years of our friendship had revealed to me your steadfast love and constancy. Reading your letters, with all my sensations distorted by the action of the drug, I became unreasonably exercised by your physical descriptions of the beautiful women and handsome men with which a vicious providence had seen fit to surround you. And one night, when the moon was full and the syringe was empty and I could find no rest, I left the hut and struck across the moor toward Baskerville Hall. 

You were strange that night, Watson. Whenever you spoke, I felt a rush of comforting familiarity; and yet otherwise, it was as if you were in a trance--or rather, as if possessed somehow by the spirit of the place. I had never made love to you; but even now, I cannot recall an occasion night or day when I have known you to be so voluptuously languid. You seemed to be wrapped in your own intoxicating silence, to be drunk on moonlight and shadow. It inspired in me the most intense and contradictory feelings. It was such an inexpressible relief to me when, after we were both spent, you turned upon me what I now recognize as the look of love, and murmured my name with such tender affection.

How could I leave you after that? It is very simple: I lay awake, and heard the voices of the evil angels that will come to one at three o'clock in the morning when the effects of the drug have worn off and the reaction has set in. Everything I had done appeared to me in a monstrous light. While perpetrating upon you an ignoble deception, under the influence of a drug I knew you hated to see me taking, I had forced my way into your bedroom, and pressed upon you attentions for which you had never asked, but which you were too generous to refuse. I could not bear to read in your eyes what I would look like to you in the cold light of day. And not knowing any other way of avoiding the catastrophe I feared, I vanished.

Back to the moors; back to the drug. I feared my next encounter with you more than death itself; and yet what I feared even more than that was that I might never see you again. You might simply cease to associate yourself with a wretch like me; and you would be right. For three days I suffered in this agony; and then a letter from you arrived. It was a deathly struggle to make myself open it, and to read it.

Oh, Watson. How can I tell you what that letter meant to me? I had gibed at you so often about your sensationalism and your weakness for romance. But in your letter, something that had appeared to me as the most sordid episode in my very chequered career acquired a dark and passionate beauty. It effected upon me and my mood a magical transformation. I had not been mistaken. You  _had_ wanted me. You  _did_ love me. And that it was all, as yet, wreathed in this romantic and sinister atmosphere--that you could only understand it, at the moment, as a dream of my shadow self--did nothing to stem the flood of relief and affection that overwhelmed me. You have been and will be celebrated by the world for so many of your remarkable stories--remarkable all the more to those of us who know the true facts. But if the object of art is to bring us closer to beauty--or even to relieve human suffering--then to my mind, you have never written anything greater than that one letter.

Our reunion at the hut was bittersweet to me; but nothing could have been more reassuring. I had your respect and your good opinion and your friendship; and I had hope. For years, I waited in hope that what we shared that night might somehow break the surface of your dream-mind and enter the waking world. You married Mary; I tried to take it well; I did not succeed. But all that time, cocaine-bottle notwithstanding, I lived in hope. And now! I feel your fingers sometimes trace the scars on my back and breast, the ridges of raised skin around my wrists, and I know that in your heart you weep for the damage done to me during those awful weeks. But I cannot regret any of it, because of what it has brought me. If I had to be wounded before I could come to you this way, then I say without hesitation: it was worth a wound. It was worth many wounds.

I am haunted, nevertheless, by my growing conviction that during that night at Baskerville Hall, we stumbled blindly upon some quality, some species of feeling, that is for you unspeakably profound, and which we have since then never quite been able to recapture. Upon rereading some of your stories, I have been struck by your sympathy with whatever landscape we travel through; how what appears to me to be a featureless and tedious expanse of grass can become for you an intimation of some elusive beauty. It seems to me that perhaps, if we returned to that place, we might embark upon an investigation into the source of this feeling, and discover how to reproduce it. Sir Henry Baskerville, who by the way tells me that he met the Moultons at a regatta in Galway and says they asked to be remembered to you, has invited us down for a week-end. I enclose with this letter two train tickets. Will you come with me, Watson, to Baskerville Hall, and investigate this mystery together, as we should have all along? Our friendship is the strongest, surest, and longest association of my life, and I feel we know its every comfortable mood and well-loved feature. But our romance is new, an untracked wilderness rolling out to the horizon in all directions, an infinite number of which we might take in the years to come. Come with me, Watson, to that marvelous country, and let us see what adventures still lie in store for us. 

Your always loving,

Sherlock Holmes

**Author's Note:**

> Since my earliest days writing fanfic in the 1990s, it has been a convention with me to end the story with a song or some kind of musical performance (because my first fics were basically Shakespeare AUs). I thought, great, I'll send them back to the opera to see Fidelio, that'll work great. I got started writing it, and I wasn't feeling it somehow, and then I thought: you started this series because you wanted to do something different, so do something different for the fluff epilogue. So I just skipped all of that--they do actually go to Fidelio, that's the opera they're missing the overture of during that long cab ride after the Society dinner, but it's just referenced--and went straight to what I always knew was going to be the closer, which is Holmes's narration of his side of the Baskerville Hall night.
> 
> When I wrote "One Page is Missing," I really did not intend for it to be the beginning of a series. I didn't think we would ever get Holmes's POV on that. But it all unrolled quite naturally once I got started writing this. Though I say it myself, this is an extraordinary letter, and it shows you how much Holmes has grown over the course of the series and how much their relationship has deepened. They don't, of course, use modern language to talk about it; but this is Holmes basically saying OK, Watson, you have sexual needs that you haven't been able to articulate to me, so let's find out what they are. From Watson's POV all along we've seen that he has kind of a thing for Dark Holmes, which is part of his nighttime world but is at odds with the heroic and virtuous light in which he typically sees Holmes. That's why he saved the burglary mask. 
> 
> I also like it that Holmes now appreciates Watson's writing and loves it. And to me, at any rate, the vision of Watson performing "For I am a pirate king!" for the Society while Holmes looks on boiling with mingled rage and lust is pretty hilarious. So all in all I think I made the right decision about how to end this. Thank you all for reading!


End file.
